October 26, 2018

Republicans Are Now Running as the Defenders of Healthcare—While Simultaneously Trying to Gut It

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23835562/republicans-health-care-preexisting-conditions-donald-trump/?fbclid=IwAR22vtfbmnO8moh7Na84lB5seue_6prH0OgzJH18cF4ZkgTJ2K74dEECOjQ
"it was never about the debt or the deficit, was it. There are no Tea Party Patriots holding rallies on the National Mall now that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that debt will rise to 96 percent of GDP by 2028. (Tea Party organizer Tim Chapman told The New York Times Tuesday that "the Tea Party wave of 2010 was animated by federal spending, but that has definitely subsided." Strange! Perhaps it has something to do with changes to The Presidential Complexion.) As others are increasingly saying outright, the plan was always to slash taxes on the wealthy, then cite the resulting budget shortfalls as a reason to cut "entitlement" programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security on the basis they constituted out-of-control spending. There are a lot of things to change in this country. One is that we ought to call Medicare and Social Security what they actually are: earned benefits that recipients have been paying into their whole lives. We ought to call Medicaid part of the social safety net that any humane society with the means provides. And we ought to find a new way to categorize what Republicans are doing right now when they cast themselves as The Real Defenders of Healthcare. "False" is no longer sufficient. "Flip-flop" is useless. Hypocrisy is drowning in a tsunami of shamelessness, and threatening to take us all under if we don't keep fighting the swirling current."